John MacDonald: There's nothing strategic about strategic voting

When you vote in November’s election, are you going to be voting for a party or are you going to be voting for a coalition?

According to Harry Mowbray, father of the Mowbray billionaires, you should be voting for the coalition you want running the place.

As he puts it on the website he’s set up, there’s an opportunity in this year’s election to change the make-up of Parliament and have a centre-right coalition governing the country for what he calls “the foreseeable future”.

But he says that can only happen if people vote strategically. He says MMP has come of age and, instead of voting for individual parties, we need to vote for the coalition we want.

You’re not going to get me involved in this strategic voting nonsense. Because that’s what it is. I’ll explain why.

But the obvious example of strategic voting that fits Harry Mowbray’s interests would be people voting to get the National/ACT/NZ First coalition back in government.

A so-called strategic vote would be voting for National in your electorate and voting ACT or NZ First with your party vote. And then, if National got more electorate seats than their party vote result entitled them to, they’d have more MPs and there’d be the overhang.

Where there are more than the standard 120 MPs in Parliament.

But, as Sir John Key pointed out at the National Party campaign launch, that could mean people from minor parties that no one’s ever heard of ending up in government.

And senior MPs such as Nicola Willis and Gerry Brownlee being out of Parliament, because they’re list-only.

The thing that puts me off this so-called strategic voting is that it’s not strategic at all, for several reasons.

For it to be strategic, all voters wanting a similar outcome would have to be in tune with each other.

For example: you might want a centre-right coalition back in government. But do you want it to be National-led or not?

Or would you rather see NZ First or ACT have more sway?

The other reason you won’t get me voting strategically to try and get a particular coalition is that, with MMP, voting is just the start.

We get the results and then the horse trading begins. You imagine someone thinking they were voting strategically back in 2017, wanting a National/NZ First coalition.

The numbers on the night made it look as if they were going to get what they voted for. But then Winston Peters announced he was going with Labour. There’s your strategic vote wasted.

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